Martha Graham once asked, “Haven’t you ever been in a room where someone you loved, who no longer loved you, walked in, and your heart fell to the floor?”
While the act of falling can be an embodiment of psychic, as well as physical realities it doesn’t always have to involve a collapse or defeat.
In fact for Martha Graham, it became a laboratory for analyzing weight and gravity, in defiance of the soaring upward thrust of ballet. Outside the world of dance few of us concern ourselves with one of the fundamental balancing forces of man. It’s just kind of there. It only enters our conscious awareness with the neurosis of aesthetics and age.
From a Somatic fanatic’s life lens, falling, weight and gravity are foundational lines of inquiry, ways to observe how I feel, think, how I move and act. Exploring Gravity has helped me acknowledge the degree to which the body-mind can let go, surrender and recycle tension, life force, fluidity, fears ~ watching the substrata of life as it moves through me.
But hang on a minute.. Isn’t there, like, a scientific thing happening here too?
Newton dreamily watched the apples fall many, many times before he wondered why they travelled earthward instead of skyward. In the cosmos there is no “up” or “down” as we think of them, no north or south. Instead the apple falling “down” is in fact falling “inward” a gravitational pull to the centre / a centripetal force. To be more correct it means falling towards the centre of the nearest massive object.
Whoa!
In my anatomical body, my centre of gravity then is closest to my pelvis, just below and behind my navel, all things being pulled towards my centre. However shift my focus, to “me” in relation to the planet and I observe that I am being held to the earth (as the nearest massive object!) due to its centre – in particular its COG, it’s centre of gravity.
Shift my view further out and I can examine the earth’s nearest massive object and so on. While a potentially overwhelming journey, as observer I can now connect how ‘I’ via the earth and all other stars and planets in this solar system are being organised from the centre of our solar system, the centre of gravity at the barycentre, not the sun but close to it.
All eight planets, all moons, the stars and asteroids are pulling on each other. Each’s gravitational pull is pulling the other planets towards it. They are all doing this to each other and this is how the shape of our universe is sustained.
So above, so below… As the observer can I return now to my human self and keep a feel for these facts. Can I embody my relationship to these facts and notice if and how that changes my thinking, feeling, moving and action.
To what extent can we make use of the ‘facts’ in our self-Embodiment Training?
Exercise 1: How does your physiology, your structure, your felt experience and your sense of balance express itself when you emphasise being organised in relation to an “up” and a “down”.
How does this ‘feel’ in your body / senses, your mind / thoughts, your emotional sense? Secure, heavy… Etc?
~
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In this construct there is no ‘up’ and no ‘down’ instead we move into the felt experience of an “inward” centripetal force and an “outward” centrifugal force allowing us to walk and move freely on the side of the earth. Can you get a feel for your centre being supported by earth’s centre?
How does this ‘feel’ in your body / senses, your mind / thoughts, your emotional sense? Consider how secure or insecure you feel, any difference in weight or dimension? Does it change the degree to which you use effort to stand or move?
It occurs to me that we would be more flexible if we got a “feeling’ for the centre of things, for this gravitational pull being towards “centre” not just the perspective of “down”. We might not pound the ground so hard with our heels. We might accept the centrifugal outward (upward) thrust of the earth and balance our forces to meet it.
* ever noted the upward push of the earth when stepping off a curb that was high or lower than anticipated? *
So we might note here that we don’t get pulled all the way to the centre of the earth! The rock beneath our feet does not give way underneath us, nor do I lay in a heap on the ground. So what happens here at this level where my feet meet the ground and I stay standing…Is there an equal and opposite force to gravity?
It wasn’t until 2003 when I started training with Judith Aston in Aston-Kinetics (then Aston-Patterning) that I heard of – ground reaction force (GRF). When my most weight bearing aspect meets the ground, the ground does not give way underneath me and therefore an “equal and opposite reaction” takes place ~ Ground Reaction Force (GRF) – if you like a recycling of energy.
Together gravity and GRF act upon objects deflecting their forces through the objects own angles and opposition of forces at play within it.
This is where it’s easier to see the futility of fixing your posture as you go about your life! Your body’s relationship to itself and to the balancing forces acting through it, your body’s relationship to the planet, to other people and daily tasks creates a dynamic moving equilibrium enabling us to sustain a perpendicular life.
Forget holding your body in a certain shape or posture and fixing it as “good” or “bad” but instead can you allow a responsive posture, to emerge out of this ongoing negotiation of ‘balance’ moment to moment. Your dynamic equilibrium is constantly being organised moment to moment by your differing aspects staying well-proportioned and relative to each other.
Sounds complicated… So take a moment to breath here.
How can we use all these things to our own advantage?
If we consider ourselves as the object and we practice aligning our centre with these forces, we experience the ease and lightness of balance, inhibiting less, allowing, receiving, trusting and listening more.
To make the unconscious conscious, we can study gravity and GRF as it moves through us ~ join me in this month’s podcast to explore doing just that. To develop sufficient body communication skills yields a relationship with your body that, like learning a new language, can open unexpected doors of perception and possibility. Among these, a sense of freedom, a lightness of your body, a lift of attitude and change of thought patterns and self-image.
As an example of the benefits of honing in on the counterbalancing of forces are the simple results of a more direct weight bearing through your skeletal system. Muscles, which are often constricted because they are called upon erroneously for structural support, are set free for responsiveness, for action, for expression. The result is less compression of joints and muscles. Learning how to use Gravity and GRF can serve as a lift–both physically and psychologically, releasing bodyweight into a more solid, connected relationship with the ground and a friendlier relationship with gravity.
There is an accompanying podcast to this blog. To receive my monthly “The Moving Self Podcast” you can SUBSCRIBE here. This month we explore gravity as a way to establish where we are in relation to our source of life, identifying how open or defensive our system currently is and what signs to look out for in your own body. We will also introduce ground reaction force and its perpetual dance with gravity to energise you throughout the day.
Sally